"The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same... In our world, in short, where we are all bombarding each other with victims... From now on we have our antisacrificial rituals of victimization, and they unfold in an order as unchangeable as properly religious rituals. First of all we lament the victims we admit to making or allowing to be made. Then we lament the hypocrisy of our lamentation, and finally we lament Christianity, the indispensable scapegoat, for there is no ritual without a victim, and in our day Christianity is always it, the scapegoat of last resort. As part of this last stage of the ritual, we affirm, in a nobly suffering tone, that Christianity has done nothing to 'resolve the problem of violence.'"
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), p. 164.
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